I agree, however...

That's what I said to them: It's braindead. But they won't listen. Talking something about we have to have addresses bound to a workstation (tied to a certain desk in a certain office, not an adapter). Up to some point (but not completely) I can understand what their problem is. Besides TCP/IP, they use SNA network functions and other services bound only to the MAC address. If an adapter is interchanged with another (could easily happen with PCMCIA cards) no address (TCP/IP or other) should change with the card. Additionally, their sniffers and network managing software has a direct link from the mac address to the office and working plance. Resumee: I tried to convince them of using the burnt-in mac address, but they did not accept. So I'm back with the problem

> Most cards do not permit overriding the MAC address.

Really? Under Windoze (NT, 95) and OS/2 all brands of our Ethernet adapters (Compaq Netelligent, Xircom, 3Com), both PCI and PCMCIA do not have problems with an overwritten mac address, and neither do the Token Ring cards.

> And almost none of the Linux net drivers provide an
> interface for doing it.

The ifconfig program in Linux does provide a parameter for this purpose, and if I use it:
./network stop eth0
ifconfig eth0 hw ether <address>
./network strat eth0
Then ifconfig --status shows the new address afterwards, and a ping to the adapter from another machine still delivers an answer. I could not manage it yet to use a sniffer to find out whether ifconfig just "lies" to me and in fact the adapter still uses the burnt-in mac address.

So if the whole thing does not really work in linux, then I'm stuck. But if it works, I'd like to know the excact point in the scripts where I should insert a hack. I could immagine thing should happen between "insmod" and "./network start eth0", before the dhcp call is made. But I'm quite new to linux and am not sure whether I am right.

Can you give me a hint? Of course I'll keep you posted with the results.